Week 9 - Cognitive Personality Theories (2024) PDF

WEEK 9 – COGNITIVE PERSONALITY THEORIES Reading: Maltby Textbook Chapter 5  LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you should be able to: Describe how cognitive theorists view humans Explain Kelly’s personal construct theory and how personal...

WEEK 9 – COGNITIVE PERSONALITY THEORIES Reading: Maltby Textbook Chapter 5  LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you should be able to: Describe how cognitive theorists view humans Explain Kelly’s personal construct theory and how personal constructs can be assessed Describe explanatory (attributional) style and how it influences our outlook Apply cognitive principles to mental health problems/ treatment (e.g., fixed role PART 1 – CONCEPTUAL ISSUES AND THE RISE OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY  FATHER OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY – WILHELM WUNDT Born in Neckerau, Baden in 1832 1856 - Studied medicine in Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin, gaining his doctorate in medicine in 1856 In 1875, a room was set aside in Leipzig to begin demonstrating perception research 1881 – started the journal Philosophische Studien 1883 – started course in experimental psychology 1894 – set up the first Institute for Experimental psychology Widely recognised as the first psychology research lab in the world  WHAT WAS THE INSTITUTE LIKE? There is first a series of five rooms, including:- (1) an antechamber; (2) a darkroom for psychophysiological research on vision; (3) two rooms containing electromagnetic instruments used for various experiments, in particular for research on attention; these rooms contain also, in glass cupboards, maps, reproductions of anatomical pieces, and demonstration models used for lessons; (4) a reading room containing the library.  WUNDT’S PSYCHOLOGY Psychology as the Science of Immediate Experience “Every mental event has an emergent form or quality.” We can break down our immediate experiences to their smallest constituents Focus on Apperception We do not just perceive the visual world; we apperceive it because we are inherently interpreting the world based on experience So, we can gain insight into processing by accessing this information via introspection Unbiased - not affected by interpretation  SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF SELF- OBSERVATION (INTROSPECTION) IN WUNDT’S LABORATORY The experimenters are lower status; they are students or demonstrators Wundt handling the himself, the equipment highest status person is the “subject” The inverse of what you would expect in a modern experiment  ROOTS OF COGNITIVE APPROACHES Gestalt theory (1920s-30s)  9 THE IMPORTANCE OF FORM: GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY. Rebellion against the atom Max Wertheimer (1910): Phi Phenomenon (Apparent movement) ------------- The Gestalt School of Psychology in Berlin in the 1920s. The WHOLE is different from the SUM OF THE PARTS HOLISM not ATOMISM - Qualities that cannot be broken down into smaller introspective elements Critique of introspective methods - turn to visual illusions and experiments  ROOTS OF COGNITIVE Gestalt theory leads to…. APPROACHES Field theory (Lewin, 1939): importance of subjective perspective and meaning in determining behaviour We have a psychological reality But it is social, subjective and changeable 'To understand or to predict behaviour, the person and his environment have to be considered as one constellation of interdependent factors'  KURT LEWIN’S INFLUENCE ON PSYCHOLOGY Established the Centre for Group Dynamics at MIT in 1944 for applied research “Action Research:” Applied research into ethnic housing discrimination and found effective integration could reduce prevalence of racism Racism is a mistaken hypothesis that can be unlearned “minority problems are in fact majority problems” and are resolved via social and economic equality  KURT LEWIN’S INFLUENCE ON PSYCHOLOGY "To bring about any change, the balance between the forces which maintain the social self-regulation at a given level has to be upset" (Lewin, K. 1948. Resolving Social Conflicts, p.47.)  LEWIN’S FIELD THEORY The first major systematic theory of social behaviour in psychology. B = f (P, E): (Behaviour is a function of a person in an environment). Behaviour is dynamic, emergent. The person behaves in the context of Graphic the ‘whole’ of the environment. representation by The environment that matters is the Lewin of field theory. environment as the person perceives it. Mathematical theory: Like other Gestalt theorists, Lewin thought that social Notice the “Outer psychology could be made scientific by world” beyond the appeal to mathematics. immediate environment.  ROOTS OF COGNITIVE APPROACHES Individual differences in field dependence (AKA Global and Local Processing/Left and Right Brain) (Embedded Figures Test; Witkin, 1949) Field-independent Field-dependent Autonomy, detached Oriented toward others Analytic, More attentive to engineering/maths context Lower interpersonal Better interpersonal skills skills  THE GESTALT INFLUENCE: GOING “BEYOND THE INFORMATION GIVEN” Tolman (1948) Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men (from last week) Rats learned a map of the maze without reinforcement (and sometimes showed their use of it by escaping the maze) Rats evidenced “mental maps” – hypotheses about where the food was located in the maze How could they invent these hypotheses without learning? How can anyone ever go beyond their learning?  CHOMSKY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF In 1959, Skinner published Verbal LINGUISTICS Behavior, in which he claimed that all human language could be explained by operant conditioning Linguist Noam Chomsky wrote a scathing review in 1959 If we look at a red chair and say “red,” the response is under the control of the stimulus redness; if we say “chair,” it is under the control of the collection of properties (for Skinner, the object) chairness, and similarly for any other response. This device is as simple as it is empty. Since properties are free for the asking (we have as many of them as we have nonsynonymous descriptive expressions in our language, whatever this means exactly), we can account for a wide class of responses in terms of Skinnerian functional analysis by identifying the controlling stimuli. But the word stimulus has lost all objectivity in this usage. Stimuli are no longer part of the outside physical world; they are driven back into the organism. (Chomsky, 1959).  CHOMSKY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS Skinner – when you see an red chair, and hear its called an red chair, you learn the association – that’s language sorted Chomsky – Skinner bases his associations on the response after the fact How do we know whether to focus on the red or the chair? Chomsky concludes we have a universal grammar – an innate structure of the world, that allows us process  CHOMSKY AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: 1960S In 1965 Chomsky published Cartesian Linguistics He distinguished language “performance” from “competence.” (what you do say/What you can say) He distinguished “Surface” from “deep” structure (and the “transformational grammar” between the two) Described all children as born with the innate capacity for grammar, and the ability to learn any language Accordingly, there should be native language universals, common to all human languages (e.g. tense, negation)  FROM TURING MACHINES TO TURING TESTS 1937 - Development of the Turing machine: With a tape and a head, the head ‘reads’ the squares and performs a limited set of operations 1943 - McCullough and Pitts: Theorized the nervous system as a logical calculus machine, closing the gap between organic and artificial intelligence 1950 - Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (published in the journal Mind)  THE NEW METAPHOR FOR MIND: IMITATION GAMES The problem can be … a game which we call the “imitation game.” It is played with … a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.... It is A’s object of the game to try to cause C to make the wrong identification.... The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator.... Turing takes the social Now we ask the question, “What will happen question of gender when a machine takes the part of A in this imitation as his marker game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as for intelligence – most often? These questions replace our original “Can a machine think?” cognitive science quickly Turing (1950). Computing machinery and moves onto other intelligence. questions of processing  INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 1960: Bruner and Miller found the Centre for Jerome Cognitive Studies at Harvard (where BF Skinner Bruner was still working) (1915- 2016) Even in the shadow of the behaviourists, “we were unafraid of words like mind, expectation, perception and meaning.” George Pioneers 7+/-2 to demarcate short and long Miller term memory (1920- 2012) 1967: Ulric Neisser publishes textbook: Cognitive Psychology Ulric Cognition is “all of the processes by which the Neisser sensory input is transformed, reduced, (1928- elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.” 2012)  KEY TENETS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Internal thought processes are critical to understanding human behaviour It is essential to develop scientifically controlled experiments (with IVs and DVs) to investigate behaviour Humans are information processors (like computers), as such, cognitive models should follow similar structures (e.g. limited capacity) PART 2 – COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PERSONALITY  THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES “A person’s processes are psychologically channelled by the ways in which he [sic] anticipates events” (Kelly, 1955) Cognitions Personal (how we think) Emotions (how we feel) George Kelly (1905- Environmen 1967) Behaviour t (how we act) (what we interact with)  PEOPLE AS NAÏVE SCIENTISTS (KELLY, 1955) People are not pushed into action by environmental or unconscious forces (unlike learning or psychodynamic theory) We are like scientists in generating and testing hypotheses about the way the world works  predict and control events (under the effect of biases and emotions – not necessarily rational) Actor/agent rather than reactor, so we actually have free will!  PEOPLE AS HAVING FREE WILL… Open to change (constructive alternativism) Subjective, error-prone We all generate different hypotheses  different personalities Generate more sophisticated predictions as we develop  PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY (KELLY, 1955) Personal constructs = cognitive discriminations that we make when making sense of the world Bipolar (good—bad, tall—short, friendly—unfriendly…) Hierarchical – first apply one construct, then consider next Used to understand and predict events and to save time We cannot know something unless we know what it contrasts with Different sets of constructs manifest in different personality characteristics Friendly—unfriendly Outgoing—quiet outgoing—Quiet  DEVELOPMENT OF CONSTRUCTS Situation Hypothes is Circumspectio Testing n Observe the environmental/soci Consider all constructs we have al response Contro l Use the best one to respond Pre- emption Pick the useful ones  KELLY’S COROLLARIES (PRINCIPLES) Construction Individuality Organisation Dichotomy Choice Range of convenience Experience Modulation Fragmentation Communality Sociality  Construction: We construct meaning for events (i.e. build concepts of the world) Not just through language (emotion/threat) Individuality: Constructions are individual (subjective) Organisation: Constructs are hierarchical (prioritised differently) Dichotomy: Constructs are bipolar Choice: We can choose alternatives that fits the specific situation best (not fixed and adaptible) Range of convenience: Some constructs/ broader vs. narrower and the way people apply them too  Experience: Constructs change based on experience and learning  Modulation: Some constructs/people more fixed vs. flexible  Fragmentation: Constructs may be inconsistent (from one another, between similar and different situations)  Communality: People with similar constructs = similar behaviour  Sociality: We perceive others’ constructs and adjust accordingly  KELLY’S COROLLARIES Construction (PRINCIPLES) Individuality Organisation Dichotomy Choice Range of convenience Experience Modulation Fragmentation Communality Sociality PART 3 – APPLICATION OF COGNITIVE PERSONALITY THEORY  PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH Healthy personal construct structures are tested, validated through experience, and adjusted when necessary Clinging onto outdated or rigid constructs, or testing unreasonable hypotheses, leads to psychological problems (thinking -> feeling) Kelly (1955): Anxiety = awareness that events you are confronted with are not explained by your construct system Threat = awareness of imminent change in core structures Fear = change in core structures Hostility = continued effort to validate failing constructs Depression = narrow world to avoid anxiety/fear, resulting in fixed and brittle constructs  KELLY’S THERAPY FOCUS Understand maladaptive personal constructs and try to challenge, revise or replace them Led to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is based on: Psychological problems are based on faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking Psychological problems are based, in part, on learned patterns of unhelpful behavior People suffering from psychological problems can learn better ways of coping with them, thereby relieving their symptoms and becoming more effective in their  KELLY’S 1950S THERAPY TECHNIQUES Fixed-role therapy Describe self in third person Therapist writes new ‘role’ for client to enact for 2 weeks Self-characterisation Fixed-role character: sketch: “Tom is quiet, “‘Roy’ is respected for his intense, anxious, not passion, sees the world good company and through others’ eyes and can’t find a girlfriend” learns from his disappointments”  EXPLANATORY STYLE: ATTRIBUTIONS Our attributions about the causes of events vary along 3 dimensions Internal vs. external Stable vs. unstable Global vs. specific Can reflect self-enhancement / self- defence Imagine you did bad on your first University essay: Internal (Personal) External (Environmental) Degree Stable Unstable Stable Unstable Global I am stupid I am ill Essays are It is Friday unfair 13th (unlucky!) Specific I am bad at I didn’t study This lecturer My halls was essays enough gives unfair really  INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES: THE ATTRIBUTIONAL STYLE QUESTIONNAIRE You have been looking for a job unsuccessfully for some time. 1. What is the major cause? 2. Is this cause due to something about you, or something about other people or circumstances? 3. In the future when looking for a job, will this cause be present? 4. Is this something that just influences looking for a job, or does it also influence other areas of your life? Totally due to other 1 2 3 4 5 6 Totally due to people/circumstance me Abramson, Seligman & Teasdale (197  ATTRIBUTIONS AND DEPRESSION Individuals suffering from depression chronically attribute negative life events to internal, global and stable causes and positive life events to external, specific and unstable causes Tripp, Catano, & Sullivan (1997) Attributiona l style: Positive events Expectancies (Optimism) Attributional style: Depressio Negative n events  LEARNED HELPLESSNESS Uncontrollable setting  give up and inappropriately generalise the feeling of helplessness to other situations Dogs/people in lab (Seligman, 1975) Older people in sheltered residences (Langer & Rodin, 1976) Victims of domestic abuse (Peterson & Seligman, 1983) Depression (Seligman, 1975) Can be reversed by external intervention (e.g., CBT may address negative attributions and helplessness beliefs)  PREDICTORS OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS Learned helplessness also be affected by: Attributional style – external & stable Self-efficacy - lower Locus of control – more external  THE CONCEPT OF FREE WILL FREE WILL or DETERMINISM? Learning Theory Psychodynamic Kelly Theory All behaviour is All behaviour is the We have the free determined by result of will to choose our experience unconscious behaviour BUT motivations and determinism is desire present The fundamental postulate of Kelly’s theory “A person’s processes are psychologically channelled by the ways in which he [sic] anticipates events” (Kelly, 1955)  WHAT MOTIVATES US IN PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY? “[PCT] intentionally parts company with psychoanalysis. Personal construct theory sees each of us as active and alive rather than inert and driven. In fact, it is so dynamic that it does not need any special system of dynamics to keep it running. We only stop moving when we are dead.” (Kelly, 1969. p. 89)  EVALUATING COGNITIVE THEORIES How well does it explain human personality? Allows for free will and deliberation Debate with behaviourists: Are cognitions needed to explain behaviour? No single framework; different terms used by different researchers (for different or same concepts?) Rational; doesn’t account for emotion or biological influences How empirically valid and testable is it? Rigorous empirical study – testable, evidence based Can be difficult to pin down some concepts to measure them How well can it be applied? Huge impact on research and therapy (e.g., cognitive behavioural therapy)  1990S COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGISTS In the 1990s, new brain imaging techniques and studies of neurological damage played an increasing role in adjudicating (judging) the value of different cognitive theories. US President George Bush (the 1st) called the 1990s “the decade of the brain” By the 1990s, many of the early pioneers later critiqued the “information processing” approach to human meaning making, turning instead to narrative (e.g., Jerome Bruner), ecological sense-making (Ulric Neisser) or embodiment (Eleanor Rosch, Lawrence Barsalou) Cognitive Psychologists were good at developing a lot of “competing theories” of cognitive phenomena (memory, attention, concepts, language, decision-making, stereotyping) By the 1990s, brain studies were increasingly seen to be adjudicating debates about competing models of cognition  FALSE DAWN OF NEUROIMAGING? “Commentators have argued that functional imaging provides little to no utility for “No functional psychologists” neuroimaging research to “new approaches … suggest date has yielded data tat that efforts in this area – can be used to distinguish although not initially maximally relevant to between competing psychology – can indeed be psychological theories” used to constrain and advance psychological Coltheart (2005) theory” Moran & Zaki (2013)  SUMMARY 1. Cognitive theories (e.g., Gestalt, field, personal constructs, attributions) recognise that individuals respond (emotionally/behaviourally) to their own active, subjective interpretation of the world 2. Kelly argued that people act as scientists and generate/test hypotheses about the world, leading to personal constructs which guide expectations and behaviour 3. People make attributions for positive/negative events (internality, globality, specificity), which influence emotions and future expectations 4. Individual differences in personal constructs, attributional style and learned helplessness are linked to mental health problems; cognitive therapy techniques aim to understand and challenge maladaptive cognitions